COGENCY: collaborative communities of grid-aware intelligent agents

Collaborative communities of grid-aware intelligent agents (COGENCY) is an environment under development for disseminating information from sensor webs. COGENCY is an environment with semi-autonomous, proactive, and collaborative software entities that can represent human actions, and adapt to changing environments. It will provide domain specialist with just-in-time access to expert domain knowledge to make decisions without the need to assemble human experts or understand the complexity of the underlying grid and agent technologies. The two major technologies (grid computing and grid-aware intelligent agents) being applied to COGENCY promotes approaches for solving problems in distributed open systems. While grid technology has focused on developing robust infrastructure to support secure resource sharing across geographically distributed virtual organizations, agent technology has focused on developing autonomous problem solving agents that can learn and respond intelligently to uncertainties in their environment. COGENCY is currently being developed to support the future combat system (FCS), but can extend beyond the domain of battle management and homeland defense into engineering disciplines and business operations. For example, aircraft or satellite modeling and spacecraft health monitoring requires a group of domain experts in decision making. This paper documents our research goals, technical approach, and implementation strategy for COGENCY development.